By MELISSA HILLEBRAND
Each year, 5.3 million head of market hogs are raised and processed by Seaboard Foods LLC, yielding more than 1.6 billion pounds of pork for 30 countries around the world.
Headquartered in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, this top pork producer manages about 500 operation sites across eight states. Caring for pigs to produce pork requires the company to have farm, milling, transportation and plant processing operations, and the company also operates a subsidiary, High Plains Bioenergy, with biodiesel, biogas and compressed natural gas facilities.
“It's a connected sustainable process of raising pigs, producing pork and using byproducts for energy,” says Kay Stinson, vice president of human resources and animal care.
About four years ago, the self-insured company took stock of its workers’ compensation claims and costs, and noted that their rising trajectory needed significant improvement—and fast. “We knew we couldn't sustain the direction we were moving in,” says Stinson.
After thorough review, this overhaul required more than a silver bullet. Instead, “we took a shotgun approach,” says Greg Mangan, director of safety, employee health and benefits.
The majority of Seaboard Foods’ employees work in or near the Oklahoma panhandle town of Guymon, which is where the company's pork processing plant is located. “Sixty percent of our 5,000 employees work and live within a 50-mile radius of a community the size of about 12,000,” says Stinson. “These are very rural environments. The closest community of 200,000 is nearly two hours from where most of our operations are located.
“We have a great workforce and we operate in good communities located in rural parts of the country,” she adds. “But there are some unique challenges.”
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One specific hurdle is that medical specialists in Seaboard's area are not located nearby. In addition, pork-processing jobs are physically demanding and workers collectively speak multiple languages. “We have five languages spoken with multiple dialects at our largest plant,” Stinson notes.
In its processing facilities, the most frequently occurring injuries are musculoskeletal. “We have more than 2,000 people who are carrying a knife and doing [cutting] work,” Stinson explains. “They are trimming meat, they are working in an assembly-line fashion. It's repetitive motions that the workers perform for eight-to-nine hour shifts, five to six days a week.”
At its farm operations, workers are most likely to be hurt by animal movement, generally in their lower extremities. “They are working with small baby pigs up to a 500-pound sow,” Stinson says. “Those animals have to be moved from point A to point B, and animals aren't always predictable.”
Safety Overhaul
In 2012, the company focused on better understanding why its workers’ compensation claims and costs were rising, and what could be done to reduce them.
The first task in this multistep process was to make clear, meaningful loss data visible to its executive and senior management team. Seaboard Foods began working with a new third-party administrator for its workers’ comp claims management, Danville, Illinois-based Cannon Cochran Management Services Inc. “We specifically selected a provider that could give us real-time meaningful data and the ability to drill down into multiple sources and locations,” says Stinson.
Second, the company needed to forge and implement a comprehensive program for injury and claim management, from triage to maximum improvement. Seaboard turned to Margaret Spence, president and CEO of Douglas Claims & Risk Consultants in West Palm Beach, Florida, whom Stinson calls “a subject matter expert in the area of workers’ comp who could work with our unique situation — our employee base, the type of work we do and our locations.”
“Margaret helped change our paradigm by getting us to focus on finding our employees the best specialized medical care right at the time of the injury,” says Mangan. Previously, Seaboard Foods worked with local medical provider networks for its injured workers. However, in rural areas, these providers tended to be general practitioners and internists—not orthopedic specialists that treat knee, shoulder and back injuries.
But now, for example, if an employee in the Guymon pork processing plant reports to its triage clinic with a musculoskeletal injury, he or she may be sent to Oklahoma City for an MRI and to see a specialist. Acknowledging the inconvenience of a five-hour drive, Mangan stresses that this affords better treatment and care to the injured worker, because he or she is able to see a specialist and receive the right diagnosis early. Employees can drive themselves, and are reimbursed for mileage and time. If an injury prohibits them from doing so, Seaboard Foods arranges for transportation.
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Lastly, Seaboard Foods unbundled some of its service providers.“We took a step back and said, ‘Who do we really need in the area of physical therapy, who do we need in pharmacy management?’” Stinson recalls. Seaboard worked with its consultant to identify new providers, and selected those that could bring actual bottom-line savings. “We learned that the ways some providers bring value is not what we were looking for. We specifically wanted to measure cost savings on the bottom line and work with providers who have the data capabilities to back up that promise.”
Seaboard also began putting much more focus on another critical piece of the workers’ comp puzzle: claims management. “A lot of our claims are in Oklahoma, and every quarter, senior leadership and the workers’ comp team meet face-to-face with our TPA and workers’ comp attorney and review claims,” says Mangan. “And we would strategically set goals and objectives, then earmark which claims we could close during the next quarter.”
Their efforts were rewarded. From 2012 (when Seaboard began its claims overhaul) to 2015, the company reduced its annual number of claims by nearly half (46 percent). Seaboard also is on pace in 2016 to record a 33 percent reduction in the number of claims incurred, year over year. Claim costs also were down by 69 percent from 2012 to 2015.
None of this could have been accomplished without the efforts of Seaboard's safety team and senior leadership. The company boosted its safety staff by 30 percent since 2012, and now includes 19 people in safety, workers’ comp risk management and triage departments companywide. “It helps that our senior leadership is so action-oriented,” Stinson adds. “After bringing our ideas to the CEO and our executive team, there was no butting of heads. Leadership understood exactly why we needed to take these actions.”
Preventing Injuries Before They Occur
“If you think about employees working at a processing plant, using knives, they may be removing neck bones,” Stinson says. “Yet we had hardly any injuries, in what operations had defined as a ‘hard job.’ But we had ‘easy’ jobs, like lifting whole pork loins into a box. And that was causing more injuries.
“That led us to re-evaluating the jobs we have in our plants, where we could determine where people should get placed,” she adds.
Working with Bardavon Health Innvations, an Overland Park, Kansas-based aggregator of physical therapy providers for workers’ comp injuries, Seaboard Foods performed a job-demand analysis, overhauling the expectations for about 400 jobs. In the near future, employees will go through Seaboard Foods’ post-offer employment test, which will place workers in specific jobs based on physical capabilities.
In addition, the company brought back what's known as a “work-conditioning program.” This involves getting employees’ bodies physically prepared to deal with the physical demands and repetitive motions they will perform at their jobs. “Our analogy is if you want to marathon, you have to build your base,” Mangan says.
“Our company strives to be an employer of choice,” adds Stinson. “Safety expectations and training for our employees starts the day they walk in looking for a job.”
Each year, NU's Excellence in Workers’ Compensation Risk Management Award is bestowed upon three organizations with notably successful loss- control, safety and return-to-work programs. They are among the top performers in managing workers’ compensation, all of them with unique success stories to share. The 2016 award is co-sponsored by Safety National and Sedgwick. The winners will present information on their programs at the 71st annual Workers Compensation Educational Conference in Orlando August 21-24.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melissa Hillebrand is the managing editor for National Underwriter Property & Casualty. She oversees the Technology and Agent & Broker channels on PropertyCasualty360.com. She has served the trade magazine industry since her graduation from Creighton University in 2004. Follow her on Twitter @PC360_Tech and @PC360_AandB.